


Desperation

by topazwinters



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Not Really Character Death, One-Shot, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:49:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1356454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/topazwinters/pseuds/topazwinters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.”<br/>- Aaron Ben-Ze'ev</p><p>John, desperate with loneliness and grief after Sherlock's fall from St Bart's, writes a letter to his best friend. Sherlock receives it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desperation

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so one of my friends sent me a bunch of really angsty Johnlock fanfics and I spent the entirety of last night eating chocolate chip ice cream and bawling my eyes out. Naturally, I had to take revenge. 
> 
> My first post-Reichenbach fic. One-shot. Enjoy, lovelies, and I'm so sorry for any unwanted sobbing jags this may or may not cause you. You can come over to my house if you want - we still have half a tub of ice cream left. xx

Sherlock.

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t know why I’m sitting down and writing a letter to you – because you’re dead. I know you are, despite what Ella and Greg and Molly seem to believe. I don’t plan on sending this to you, even though I hear the things they whisper when they think I’m out of earshot. They say that I’m insane, that I honestly believe you’re going to come back from the dead. I’m not insane. At least, I don’t think I am. But maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know, really.

Lately, I don’t know much of anything. So I suppose it’s not a huge change, is it?

Knowing things was your job, not mine. My job was to tag along and stroke that colossal ego of yours and mop up all the ridiculous messes you always left in your wake. Why did that make me so damn happy, Sherlock, just to know that you needed me just as much as I needed you, however fervently you tried to deny it? Why was it enough to be the sidekick in your story instead of the hero in my own?

Another thing you would know the answer to, added to the long list of questions I’ll never get to ask you.

Damn it, Sherlock, you were the best and worst man I’ve ever known and somehow you were able to make everything all right, even when my worst nightmares were coming true. Is it wrong to hate a dead man? Because I do hate you, you know. Every day, I hate you more and more because now you’re gone and the nightmares are free to roam without fear. Why did you have to jump off that roof? For once, just for _once_ in your bloody life, why didn’t you listen to me?

And you know what the worst part is? I don’t hate you. I don’t hate you at all. You’re everything I ever needed wrapped up into one tall, beautiful, enigmatic package. I’m lost without you, because you are the centre of everything that makes up who I am.

 _Were_ the centre of everything, I should probably say. Except I don’t like to think of somebody like you in the past tense. I never really believed you could die, you know that? I mean, I’m not an idiot – though you always called me one, so many times it came to become a sort of twisted compliment. In the back of my mind I knew you would die one day, of course, but I always thought I’d go long before you. It’s just – you were so vibrant and gorgeous and brilliant and _alive,_ how could you ever leave?

Well, now I know.

And there’s one other reason I don’t hate you – because I love you.

I’m saying it out loud right now, three little words that I was always too bloody scared to voice back when they might have meant something. Can you hear me, Sherlock? Funny how easy it is to let it leave my tongue, now that you are gone forever and only empty silence is here as an answer. Funny how many nights I lay awake, listening to the sound of your violin at four in the morning and wondering whether I should just march up to you and blurt it out.

I almost did. So many times, I almost did.

Would you have seen it coming? Would you have rolled your eyes, told me how achingly _obvious_ it was, rattled off a list of indicators no regular human being ever could have picked up on, ended with a polite but uninterested dismissal, gone back to your violin as if nothing had changed between us?

Or would I have surprised you? You told me once that there was always something you missed – so would this, this secret thing I guarded so carefully, have been it?

It’s too late now. I suppose I’ll never know.

I’ve been talking to you, you know – out loud, not just in this letter. Do you hear me, Sherlock, up in heaven or wherever you are? I’ve never believed in that sort of thing – you probably knew that, even though we never once spoke about it – but now I’m not so sure. I hope you are in heaven. I hope you’re happy, even though every time I think about you my heart shatters even more and I can’t seem to find the only glue that could ever fix me, the glue of you: your deductions, your violin, your experiments, your rudeness, all of your little things that irritated me so much back then, all of your little things that I would give anything, _anything,_ to see just once more.

Christ, Sherlock. I’m tired. So tired of defending you against these blind, ignorant people who don’t understand why I can’t move on from you. So tired of sitting and asking myself all the questions I never got to voice when you were still here.

And just tell me this – if you knew everything there ever was to know, if you were so indestructible, then why did you do it? Why did you let go, just like that, and leave me behind? And, damn it, what is there for me now that you’re gone?

Tell me. Please, Sherlock. Just tell me, because I don’t know how long I can do this without you.

John

 

* * *

 

_John is out. He is wandering aimlessly along the streets of London, gravitating towards the park in which he first reunited with Mike Stamford after having been invalidated home from Afghanistan. The doctor has taken to doing so more often lately, and it makes it easier for this evening’s visitor to unlock the door and check in from time to time – unseen, unnoticed, unrealised._

_Dust is gathering. The visitor’s eyes sweep over the familiar flat, the place he once called home. He is careful not to disturb John’s belongings._

_He treads softly across the carpet and reaches the coffee table. Mugs of cold tea sit, half-empty; unpaid electricity and water bills are strewn over the surface; old case files lie scattered, practically inviting him to leaf through them. But he has made this mistake once before, and it is one he in no hurry to repeat – since their parting, John has taken to almost obsessively reading through the files, and the suspicious perusal of them after that incident had put a stop to the behaviour in good time._

_In any case, he has no desire to be assaulted by the unwelcome sentiment that comes from digging up old memories._

_Now, his sharp gaze catches on an envelope lying next to one of the case files. His name is written on it in a quavering script. The ink is still wet; a pen is lying, uncapped, nearby._

_He feels a curious jolt of foreboding as he picks it up, as if something menacing is hiding within the commonplace white envelope. But what is even more disconcerting is the almost sinister feeling that he has done this before, as if he is simply going through the motions of a well-rehearsed script. It is ridiculous, of course; this is the first time he has seen a letter on John’s table, let alone one addressed to him – and yet, he cannot quite seem to stifle the sensation, no matter how hard he tries._

_He slides the letter out of the envelope._

_Most of the time, he can read one page of a book in less than five seconds. But as he glances over this unassuming sheet of paper, he forces himself to slow down, to scrutinise every word – nay, every solitary letter – that John has penned to him. He tastes the man’s heartbreak and desolation, feels the abandonment that has led him to sitting alone in an empty flat and writing to a dead flatmate._

_Every sentence is another knife driven into his already aching heart; every paragraph another hole eaten in his already moth bitten soul._

_Three words make him freeze._

_He reads them once more, and then a third time, as if making sure that they are real, as if he cannot trust his own eyes to tell him the truth. He reads them as if they are words that he has been longing to hear for years and decades and veritable centuries. He reads them as if he is a man who has suffered through inconceivable horrors simply to get to this point, to reach this salvation._

_He reaches the end of the letter. Closes his eyes. Says the three words out loud to the cold silence of the flat, nearly stumbling over the “L” that precedes the second. They should taste like honey on his tongue, and yet they are nothing but vinegar._

_Then he checks his watch. John is not due home for another hour._

_He sits on the couch. Takes off his gloves, steeples his trembling hands underneath his chin. His eyes flutter shut against the deluge of words pounding against the walls of his brain, and for a moment he simply sits and basks in the agony of loss, in the pain of the knowledge that the bravest man he has ever known is breaking without him, and he is utterly powerless to stop it._

_Just before he retreats into his mind palace, he remembers the envelope._

_It takes everything in him to pick it up and throw it. Still, his aim is impeccable. It lands on the overflowing stack of opened letters – all with the same name scrawled on the front, all heaped precariously in the trash bin._

_Then he begins the deletion process._


End file.
